How to not be tech illiterate guide (handbook)
First of all we will start with the sweetest operating systems, after reading this you will easily be able to recognise someone who actually knows sosmething about modern tech literature and someone who doesn't know anything.
Let's make things clear first and make a difference between an extremist(a retard) and an tech educated person:
Extremist - Windows is garbage there is nothing good about windows, microsoft made it, its complete trash and you should switch to linux.
Tech educated person - Linux is better than windows because it gives you freedom, you can easily customise it and it's not bloated (as long as you don't make it bloated), but if you are using windows that's fine. (You can always make a joke as long as it's just a joke not serious opinion).
So now the second main question comes which OS should I use?
I would recommend some of the following:
Debian, Arch, Gentoo or LFS <---- Linux distros be aware that every distro has it's pros and cons.
You should also try FreeBSD or OpenBSD.
Ubuntu has spyware built-in so I wouldn't recommend using it but you can always give it a try.
At the end you can use any OS you like even Windows or some OS you find on github or 4chan as long as you understand it's pros and cons and you are not being an extremist.
One of topics where everyone has different opinion, I personally recommend you to try out systemd then initrc then openrc and see which one fits your workflow the most all of them are fine, don't consider yourself less skilled if you use systemd instead of openrc or consider yourself better because you use openrc instead of systemd.
I will make things clear here from the begining and I will focus on linux here
You should never bloat your system with some stupid things such as GNOME, KDE,... and other stupid things instead you should consider trying lightweight and free software and replace all the bloat you possibly can, of course you should not be an extremist here too and claim that everyone who use bloated software is a retard, I met lots of people who are very good with tech but still use bloated software.
What do I recommend? I would recommend you trying DWM or some similar window manager my personal preference is dwm + dmenu + st with patches, of course you can use some other software but this is the one I enjoy the most, you should replace LibreOFFICE with Onlyoffice or someother softwawre such as zathura, you should use feh for images, you should consider using vim or emacs with plugins.
Browser? Sadly today we don't have an browser which we can call "perfect" every browser misses at least something, for example firefox and chromium are not lightweight enough and sometimes both of them has weird erros, browsers such as lynx, qutebrowser and w3m are cool but all of them miss at least one thing that browser needs, I personally use chromium but you can choose whatever you want.
Why window manager instead of dekstop enviorment such as XFCE4? Because after sometime you will get used to window manager and then you will do things way faster than you do with your desktop.
One of hardest questions we will cover in this handbook, most of people claims that xorg is too old and unstable while others claims that wayland is way more unstable and unusable.
I personally prefer xorg but it is okay if you go for wayland I met lots of people who likes wayland more because xorg is too old and has some weird and unneeded things, both of them has its pros and cons.
Again here you should not be an extremist but you should understand that you have to learn C/C++ if you want to be tech educated, high-level languages such as python, ruby and others are good to know but if you are really looking to understand tech then you have to learn more about memory management, pointers and how things works on low-level, C/C++ should always be used when it comes to some stuff which requires good time complexity and which requires small memory usage, for things such as web scrapping, AI,... you should use high-level languages, you should learn at least some basics of assembly and you should consider learning shell in order to write some basic shell scripts and work with your system properly and you should learn at least some basic system calls.
If you want to be tech educated you should learn pros and cons of OOP concepts and you should learn at least a little bit about time complexity, algorithms and data strcture.
This is the topic where most people who are deeply into tech literature get's mad, I personally think that websites today are full of bloat and they should consider using GO and WASM instead of javascript or PHP, of course it is okay to use both javascript and php but if you do at least consider bloating website a little less, for example why an car reviews website need tons of animations, tons of additional stuff and third party spyware? Why can't website just have an simple account system and option to post your opinion about the car.
This part is very sweet, you should learn at least some basic theory which will help you later on practice, what I mean by basic theory is not what TCP/IP is, I mean something like what are pros and cons of musl and glibc, what are pros and cons of gcc and clang, what is POSIX, what is UNIX and UNIX ideology, GNU ideology, you should learn at least something about compilers (how they work, what is dynamical linker,...).
This is the part where most people fail and proof that they have complex and that they learn only because they has complex.
You should never get into an serious online argument or try to flashcard someone (You can do this sometimes but you should not do this on your daily bases).
You should always attempt to help beginners with out making fun out of them if they are looking to learn and you should always be kind and nice to everyone, if you had a bad day I strongly don't recommend you going into tech communities because opinions in this field are really different and people in community has a different opinions, experiences and skills and you can easly get pissed off even more.
If someone is really skilled but being toxic you should just go away from him, its better to have someone kind and polite with your skill level or even smalller skill level around you then having a toxic professional.
I would strongly recommend you to avoid any kind of argue about what technology is better and why, if you that someone is "stupid" or just have different opinion, don't start an argue just ignore it.
This topic is the in which most people either don't care at all or pay full attention to it, it is okay to just don't care about your OPSEC and anonymity as long as you consider consequences of it, if you just throw away your OPSEC that doesn't mean you are tech illiterate, but if you want to be anonymous online and if you take your opsec serious, you should consider using tor, proxys, monero, disable all the cookies, pay attention to browser fingerprints, use https only, use noscript, use Qube OS and Tails,... You should consider consequences of these steps too.
- YOU SHOULD NEVER CONSIDER YOURSELF AS THE ONE WHO IS BETTER THAN EVERYONE AND THAT YOU KNOW EVERYTHING IT IS NOT THE BLAME TO ASK A BASIC QUESTION AND IF YOU ALWAYS PRETEND THAT YOU KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON'T YOU WILL NEVER LEARN SOMETHING!
--> This is pretty much the end of this little guide at least for now, I will maybe update as time pass but for now that's it, I hope you learned something new :D.